Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Justice Anthony Kennedy finally put the shame of marriage inequality behind us. "The centrality of marriage to the human condition makes it unsurprising that the institution has existed for millennia and across civilizations.... That history is the beginning of these cases. The respondents say it should be the end as well. To them, it would demean a timeless institution if the concept and lawful status of marriage were extended to two persons of the same sex. Marriage, in their view, is by its nature a gender-differentiated union of man and woman. This view long has been held--and continues to be held--in good faith by reasonable and sincere people here and throughout the world. The petitioners acknowledge this history but contend that these cases cannot end there. Were their intent to demean the revered idea and reality of marriage, the petitioners' claims would be of a different order. But that is neither their purpose nor their submission. To the contrary, it is the enduring importance of marriage that underlies the petitioners' contentions. This, they say, is their whole point. Far from seeking to devalue marriage, the petitioners seek it for themselves because of their respect--and need--for its privileges and responsibilities. And their immutable nature dictates that same-sex marriage is their only real path to this profound commitment. Recounting the circumstances of three of these cases illustrates the urgency of the petitioners' cause from their perspective. Petitioner James Obergefell, a plaintiff in the Ohio case, met John Arthur over two decades ago. They fell in love and started a life together, establishing a lasting, committed relation. In 2011, however, Arthur was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. This debilitating disease is progressive, with no known cure. Two years ago, Obergefell and Arthur decided to commit to one another, resolving to marry before Arthur died. To fulfill their mutual promise, they traveled from Ohio to Maryland, where same-sex marriage was legal. It was difficult for Arthur to move, and so the couple were wed inside a medical transport plane as it remained on the tarmac in Baltimore. Three months later, Arthur died. Ohio law does not permit Obergefell to be listed as the surviving spouse on Arthur's death certificate. By statute, they must remain strangers even in death, a state-imposed separation Obergefell deems 'hurtful for the rest of time.' He brought suit to be shown as the surviving spouse on Arthur's death certificate." It is worth noting as my colleague Omar Encarnación points out that 19 countries have already legalized gay marriage, including South Africa, Ireland, and Brazil. There is simply no reason for a constitutional state to tell two consenting adults of any race or gender that they cannot choose with whom to build a life. This is, as Hannah Arendt writes, a basic right of privacy and dignity. "The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which 'the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin or color or race' are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs."

President Obama eulogized the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney. "He was in the pulpit by 13, pastor by 18, public servant by 23. He did not exhibit any of the cockiness of youth, nor youth's insecurities; instead, he set an example worthy of his position, wise beyond his years, in his speech, in his conduct, in his love, faith, and purity. As a senator, he represented a sprawling swath of the Lowcountry, a place that has long been one of the most neglected in America. A place still wracked by poverty and inadequate schools; a place where children can still go hungry and the sick can go without treatment. A place that needed somebody like Clem. His position in the minority party meant the odds of winning more resources for his constituents were often long. His calls for greater equity were too often unheeded, the votes he cast were sometimes lonely. But he never gave up. He stayed true to his convictions. He would not grow discouraged. After a full day at the capitol, he'd climb into his car and head to the church to draw sustenance from his family, from his ministry, from the community that loved and needed him. There he would fortify his faith, and imagine what might be. Reverend Pinckney embodied a politics that was neither mean, nor small. He conducted himself quietly, and kindly, and diligently. He encouraged progress not by pushing his ideas alone, but by seeking out your ideas, partnering with you to make things happen. He was full of empathy and fellow feeling, able to walk in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes. No wonder one of his senate colleagues remembered Senator Pinckney as 'the most gentle of the 46 of us--the best of the 46 of us.'"

Ta-Nehisi Coates applauds South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for supporting the removal of the Confederate battle flag off of the grounds of that state's capitol, but he thinks her reasoning is based on a bit of intellectual slight of hand: "Nikki Haley deserves credit for calling for the removal of the Confederate flag. She deserves criticism for couching that removal as matter of manners. At the present moment the effort to remove the flag is being cast as matter of politesse, a matter over which reasonable people may disagree. The flag is a 'painful symbol' concedes David French. Its removal might 'offer relief to those genuinely hurt,' writes Ian Tuttle. 'To many, it is a symbol of racial hatred,' tweeted Mitt Romney. The flag has been 'misappropriated by hate groups,' claims South Carolina senator Tom Davis. This mythology of manners is adopted in lieu of the mythology of the Lost Cause. But it still has the great drawback of being rooted in a lie. The Confederate flag should not come down because it is offensive to African Americans. The Confederate flag should come down because it is embarrassing to all Americans. The embarrassment is not limited to the flag, itself. The fact that it still flies, that one must debate its meaning in 2015, reflects an incredible ignorance. A century and a half after Lincoln was killed, after 750,000 of our ancestors died, Americans still aren't quite sure why."

Paul Ford thinks that Google Maps is changing the way we interact with our world: "In recent years, Google Maps has become increasingly three-dimensional. The early versions were built on top of a document-delivery platform: the Web. But now the experience is far smoother. Gone is the liminal space between layers and the pauses between zooms. You just zoom in and out of the world. Amidst all the maps, layers, and views, Google has created more map than territory. Google calls this the Ground Truth project, or its effort to map the world via an 'authoritative' mix of 'algorithms and elbow grease.' In the hot center of San Francisco, the amount of detail on Google Maps can feel overwhelming--each floor of the Nordstrom's on Market Street, for example, is mapped. God help us when store inventory systems are tied to this leviathan, and you'll be able to drill down from high above the ocean to the books on the shelves at the bookstore. Except there will be no bookstores. One thing you can do when you have Ground Truth, when you really, truly understand where things are, is make a self-driving car. You start with a set of points describing the roads, and then you turn a car into a rolling computer. It seems almost inevitable, in retrospect."

Ross Arbes wonders at the Talmud's popularity in South Korea and describes the path it took to get there: "Every bookstore I visited in and around the [Seoul], including a small kiosk at the airport, sold at least one version of the Talmud. Rabbi Litzman, the Chabad rabbi in Seoul, told me that copies of the book are available in convenience stores and in some train-station kiosks. According to the Jewish Chronicle of London, the book can be found in book-vending machines. Most people I met in South Korea had at least heard of the Talmud, even if they had not read it. Aviya Amir, a master's student researching the translation of the Talmud and its popularity in Japan and South Korea, told me that, in Japan, 'nobody has a clue' what the Talmud is. 'It's not like in Korea,' she said, 'where you ask random people on the street and tell them you're researching Talmud, and they go, "Ah, Talmud."' Lee Kyou-Hyuk, a famous speed skater who carried the South Korean flag at the 2014 Olympics, recommended the Talmud to his fans. 'I read the Talmud every time I am going through a hard time,' he told reporters. 'It helps to calm my mind.' Kyobo, the largest bookstore in South Korea, keeps a list of the top two thousand 'steady-sellers,' books that have sustained strong sales for multiple years. Six different Talmuds are currently on the list. Dr. Jeongso Jeon, a professor of children's education at Bucheon University, near Seoul, said that, if you consider all of its versions, the book is 'the second-best-seller in South Korea,' behind the Bible. (Another scholar I spoke to disputed this claim as an exaggeration.)"

Santiago Zabala turns to Martin Heidegger in the LA Review of Books to ask: "[I]s it possible to live an authentic life in this metaphysical age, where Being has been forgotten in favor of entities? What does this world look like? As Heidegger once told Der Spiegel: 'Everything functions. That is exactly what is uncanny. Everything functions and the functioning drives us further and further to more functioning, and technology tears people away and uproots them from the earth more and more. I don't know if you are scared; I was certainly scared when I recently saw the photographs of the earth taken from the moon. We don't need an atom bomb at all; the uprooting of human beings is already taking place. We only have purely technological conditions left.' These technological conditions are the result of overlooking Being in favor of beings, that is, the disclosure of worlds for what gets revealed within those worlds. This is why science 'does not think' but rather 'calculates.' Ever since modernity, when the human subject became the point of reference for everything and nature was reduced to what can be subjected to human domination, the essence of the species has been framed (Ge-Stell) by a power we do not control. This, after all, is the sensation we all have today where 'the only emergency,' as Heidegger once said, 'is the absence of a sense of emergency.' The fact that in 2015 we are all monitored, spied on, and soon also biogenetically engineered confirms the German philosopher's prediction of a world 'where self-certainty has become unsurpassable, where everything is held to be calculable, and especially where it has been decided, with no previous questioning, who we are and what we are supposed to do.' This is why, as we can see in this video from 1969, Heidegger does not believe we need to better describe the world in order to change it; rather, we must learn to interpret it differently. Heidegger, like many other philosophers after him, was alarmed not only by human beings living inauthentic lives in technological societies but also by the way we are becoming technological ourselves. In this condition philosophy, as an analysis of our concepts, traditions, and world, would lose its educational and critical role within society."

Neil Genzlinger reflects on how a new spate of popular culture TV shows is exploring the increasing dependence of humans on robots. "We are, we keep being told, right on the verge of having robots become omnipresent in our lives. 'Humans' invites us to contemplate the consequences of that, and look beyond the obvious problem of what happens when the robots achieve independence of thought (which, it bears repeating, they always, always, always do). One of the show's themes is how ceding our roles and choices to machines threatens us. What happens to motherhood when a robot can read a bedtime story to a child more entertainingly than Mom can, a reality Laura confronts? What happens to aging with dignity when an eldercare robot bosses you around as if you were a child? And let's not even get into how difficult it will be to make corrections once robots swarm our lives. It takes us years just to recall faulty airbags; imagine the obstacles to retreating from the robotic future if, 10 or 20 years into it, we decide we don't like the repercussions." As is so often the case, we are told this is happening, as if we humans have lost our political will to decide. If there is a warning in the package, one barely notices it from the shiny paper, which makes them more a celebration than provocation. Still, the overarching question is clear: as robots and drones take on more of the traditionally human activities and do so in ways that are rational, efficient, and cheap, will we humans embrace brain and bodily prostheses and implants and choose to become ever more like machines?

This week on the Blog, Kazue Koishikawa discusses how Arendt's regard for storytelling reveals a difference between meaning and purpose, which in turn yields an important element of political and human life, in the Quote of the Week. Author H. G. Wells reflects on the clumsiness with which the human mind is able to grasp the truth in this week's Thoughts on Thinking. Finally, Mark Olson, one of our followers on Twitter, shares a picture of his personal library of Arendt, whose works he used to create two independent study courses while studying in college, in this week's Library feature.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Andrew M. Schocket thinks he knows why the American Revolution is such a fertile ground for rhetoric in contemporary American politics: "the American Revolution was indeed unusual, as is its relation to the American present. Unlike many other countries, the United States can point to a period of less than two decades as its seminal founding moment. Most other nations have either multiple founding moments or have lived through various evolutions. Unlike the United States, most countries trace their origins to ethnicity and language, rather than to the establishment of a particular political structure. The United States retains its governmental form from the federal constitution that served as the Revolution's crowning achievement, and so its citizens look to the people who established that form as authorities on it. Most other countries have been through multiple iterations of their national governments. The founding generation of the United States was a particularly articulate bunch, whose vast public and private writings have been preserved, ever at the ready. Few other nations have a single generation of leaders that happen to have left such a wordy legacy, always available for apparent authority and, perhaps, exploitation." Schocket's reflections come from his new book, Fighting over the Founders: How We Remember the American Revolution, which is about the continuing fights over the founding documents of American government--fights, he argues, about nationalism and belonging. Hannah Arendt too saw our continuing worship of the U.S. Constitution as central to the American ideal of freedom, but Arendt argued that the substantive innovation in American constitutional democracy was the abolition of sovereignty: "The great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politics of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same." The truly innovative idea of American government for Arendt was to so multiply sources of power on the federal, state, and local levels so that powerful institutions throughout society would exist to resist tyranny whenever it would begin to emerge, as undoubtedly it does. The real danger to American freedom, in Arendt's reading, is the rise of centralized government bureaucracies that undermine the power-based institutions of civic life. Read more about Arendt's view of American democracy here.

Bard College President Leon Botstein was asked by James Traub about the moral core of running a Liberal Arts College. Botstein's answer is well worth hearing. In part, Botstein talks about the lesson he learned as a child of immigrants and how it has affected his understanding of how to run a liberal arts college: "The moral of the story is that we learned two things. Which have stuck with all of us. One is that if you are ever in the position of privilege, which we as immigrants never expected ourselves to be, you have an obligation to do the right thing and to do the right thing now. You cannot excuse not acting on behalf of what is right and what is needed. You have to imagine that what went wrong in the Second World War among other things was the failure of ordinary people to stand up for what was right. We never expected ourselves to be in a position to help. We turned out to be in such a position. And it informs what I do.... We run, public, not charter schools, high-school early colleges, that reach underserved populations: Two in NYC; Two full high schools; a one-year college prep program in Harlem Children's Zone; A full high school in Newark; One in Cleveland and we're opening one in Baltimore. And a one-year program in New Orleans. We're a private college, unendowed. And we're running these public institutions." He was then asked: "Is this by the way, as a practical question, is this an affordable expense for a school like Bard, that is barely surviving?" Botstein's answer: "It is the wrong question--because you have nothing to lose. The people who are risk-averse are the rich, who become like Fafnir in Wagner's Ring. You know in Wagner's Ring, the gold is cursed. The two brothers fight each other over the gold. Fasolt gets killed. And Fafnir gets the gold and what does he do? (From the viewer's point of view for the next 12 hours in Valkyrie and Siegfried,...) In real life, for a long time, until Siegfried becomes mature, he sits immobilized, having turned himself into a dragon guarding the gold. So what was the gold for?"

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone tells the story of Michael Winston, a whistleblower who has both been celebrated as a hero for exposing fraud at Countrywide Financial and sued and penalized to an extraordinary degree. "This is the age of the whistleblower. From Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden to the latest cloak-and-dagger lifter of files, ex-HSBC employee Hervé Falciani, whistleblowers are becoming to this decade what rock stars were to the Sixties--pop culture icons, global countercultural heroes. But one of America's ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don't do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don't end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it's worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime." We venerate whistleblowers because they have the moral courage to stand up in the face of bureaucratic evil and do the right thing. But such moral actors are also disloyal and even lawbreakers, leading them to be scorned and punished. Taibbi details the way that Winston and others have had their lives destroyed after first being venerated for being heroes.

One of the great intellectual institutions in the United States has just been reinvigorated. The NY Times Magazine--until recently a sickly image of its former self--arrived this weekend not only bigger and printed on weightier paper, but newly committed to the world of letters. One example of the new Times Magazine will be the repeating column on photography by Teju Cole. In his first column, Cole writes of some of his favorite imagistic chroniclers the Civil Rights Movement, first among them Roy DeCarava. He begins with a description of DeCarava's "Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963": "One such image left me short of breath the first time I saw it. It's of a young woman whose face is at once relaxed and intense. She is apparently in bright sunshine, but both her face and the rest of the picture give off a feeling of modulated darkness; we can see her beautiful features, but they are underlit somehow. Only later did I learn the picture's title, 'Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963' which helps explain the young woman's serene and resolute expression. It is an expression suitable for the event she's attending, the most famous civil rights march of them all. The title also confirms the sense that she's standing in a great crowd, even though we see only half of one other person's face (a boy's, indistinct in the foreground) and, behind the young woman, the barest suggestion of two other bodies. The picture was taken by Roy DeCarava, one of the most intriguing and poetic of American photographers. The power of this picture is in the loveliness of its dark areas. His work was, in fact, an exploration of just how much could be seen in the shadowed parts of a photograph, or how much could be imagined into those shadows. He resisted being too explicit in his work, a reticence that expresses itself in his choice of subjects as well as in the way he presented them.... All technology arises out of specific social circumstances. In our time, as in previous generations, cameras and the mechanical tools of photography have rarely made it easy to photograph black skin. The dynamic range of film emulsions, for example, were generally calibrated for white skin and had limited sensitivity to brown, red or yellow skin tones. Light meters had similar limitations, with a tendency to underexpose dark skin. And for many years, beginning in the mid-1940s, the smaller film-developing units manufactured by Kodak came with Shirley cards, so-named after the white model who was featured on them and whose whiteness was marked on the cards as 'normal.' Some of these instruments improved with time. In the age of digital photography, for instance, Shirley cards are hardly used anymore. But even now, there are reminders that photographic technology is neither value-free nor ethnically neutral. In 2009, the face-recognition technology on HP webcams had difficulty recognizing black faces, suggesting, again, that the process of calibration had favored lighter skin."

Aminatta Forna wonders why we need canons: "Forty years ago the great Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o argued against the idea of national canons. There should, he said, be a single department with a single word on the door and that word should be LITERATURE. A perfectly excellent idea, it seems to me, which naturally never came to pass. Instead, the study of literature became fragmented by the politics of university departments. Categories were added: American literature, post-colonial literature, comparative literature, women's literature. The creative output of the world's writers was hived off, territory was staked out and defended. In university departments no doubt this stuff mattered, because it came with opportunities for funding, career advancement and empire building. (In fact, it has been interesting to observe in recent times something of a reversal of fortunes, as English departments in British universities have their funding cut, while in the US a diverse student body has begun to insist on a range of subjects to reflect their interests. We will have to wait and see what long-term impact these changes will have.) All this classifying, it seems to me, is the very antithesis of literature. The way of literature is to seek universality. Writers try to reach beyond those things that divide us: culture, class, gender, race. Given the chance, we would resist classification. I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer. We hyphenated writers complain about the privilege accorded to the white male writer, he who dominates the western canon and is the only one called simply 'writer.'"

In an essay about the rhetorical strategies engaged in Mein Kampf, Albrecht Kaschorke suggests that the book, rather than more modern forms of communication, is the great form of dictatorial communication: As different as the works of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and Mu'ammar Gadhafi are in style and ideology, the bibliocentric orientation of their regimes is something they have in common. In simplified, ideal-typical terms, we may speak of the book as the symbolic center of the totalitarian system. It forms the sacral center of a state propaganda that otherwise employs more modern media: radio, film, and television. The book is given out to party cadres, even to the entire population, and assumes the character of a constitutional document; at a minimum, it is endowed with an authority to which tribute must be paid in the regime's public displays and within its power networks. The book's guiding idea is to provide a durable foundation for a political formation that has emerged from the tumultuous events of war and revolution and is extremely precarious when it comes to legitimacy and stability. Consequently, the book serves a quasi-religious function and is meant to inherit the mantle of the holy books of the great world religions. This explains the tension between, on the one hand, the use of technical and industrial media by the regime's propaganda and, on the other, the archaizing rituals carried out around the sacral book, blending bibliophilic splendor, fetishism, talismanic touching, and other forms of magical performance in a peculiar syndrome."

Ta-Nehisi Coates, eulogizing David Carr, tells the story of how Carr hired him to his first journalism job: "In the February of 1996, I sent David Carr two poorly conceived college-newspaper articles and a chapbook of black-nationalist poetry--and David Carr hired me. I can't even tell you what he saw. I know that I immediately felt unworthy--a feeling that never quite faded--because I was a knucklehead and a fuck-up. But what I didn't then know about David Carr was that he'd written and edited the knucklehead chronicles, and published annual editions wholly devoted to the craft of fucking-up. I think that David--recovering crack addict, recovering alcoholic, ex-cocaine dealer, lymphoma survivor, beautiful writer, gorgeous human--knew something about how a life of fucking up burrows itself into the bones of knuckleheads, and it changes there, transmutes into an abiding shame, a gnawing fear which likely dogs the reformed knucklehead right into the grave. Perhaps that fear could be turned into something beautiful. Perhaps a young journalist could pull power from that fear, could write from it, the way Bob Hayes ran with it, because the fear was not of anything earthly but of demons born from profound shame and fantastic imagination."

Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge

Invite Only. RSVP Required.

Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?

A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape

Monday, April 6, 2015

Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm

SAVE THE DATE - 2015 FALL CONFERENCE

Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015

The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year onThursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!

This week on the Blog, Etienne Tassin discusses how we can use Arendt to understand the political success of those demonstrators who rallied together in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in the Quote of the Week. Leo Tolstoy provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We appreciate Arendt's collection of books on Marxist capitalism in our Library feature. And we congratulate our post-doctoral fellow Michiel Bot on receiving the Witteveen Memorial Fellowship in Law and Humanities at Tilburg University for the summer of 2015.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Jonathan Chait explains the rules of the new political correctness movement: "Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing. This has led to elaborate norms and terminology within certain communities on the left. For instance, 'mansplaining,' a concept popularized in 2008 by Rebecca Solnit, who described the tendency of men to patronizingly hold forth to women on subjects the woman knows better--in Solnit's case, the man in question mansplained her own book to her. The fast popularization of the term speaks to how exasperating the phenomenon can be, and mansplaining has, at times, proved useful in identifying discrimination embedded in everyday rudeness. But it has now grown into an all-purpose term of abuse that can be used to discredit any argument by any man. (MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry once disdainfully called White House press secretary Jay Carney's defense of the relative pay of men and women in the administration 'man­splaining,' even though the question he responded to was posed by a male.) Mansplaining has since given rise to 'whitesplaining' and 'straightsplaining.' The phrase 'solidarity is for white women,' used in a popular hashtag, broadly signifies any criticism of white feminists by nonwhite ones. If a person who is accused of bias attempts to defend his intentions, he merely compounds his own guilt. (Here one might find oneself accused of man/white/straightsplaining.) It is likewise taboo to request that the accusation be rendered in a less hostile manner. This is called 'tone policing.' If you are accused of bias, or 'called out,' reflection and apology are the only acceptable response--to dispute a call-out only makes it worse. There is no allowance in p.c. culture for the possibility that the accusation may be erroneous. A white person or a man can achieve the status of 'ally,' however, if he follows the rules of p.c. dialogue. A community, virtual or real, that adheres to the rules is deemed 'safe.' The extensive terminology plays a crucial role, locking in shared ideological assumptions that make meaningful disagreement impossible." Chait goes too far when he suggests that the only discrimination worth fighting is the overt kind, that their aren't systematic race, gender, and class biases that need to be addressed. The problem is not the invention of a word like "mansplained," which can bring to light invisible harms in an original way. The problem is when such words become a weaponized jargon whose use not only brings new insights to light but also offers an ad hominem attack on a person as a clichéd member of a group. Instead of a conversation about ideas, p.c. accusations like "mansplaining" or "Islamophobia" address people as cardboard representations of ideological oppressors and seek to dismiss them through a jargon that has a multi-valenced meaning only accessible to those initiated into a particular worldview. This is a phenomenon that Peter Baehr has rightly called unmasking (an idea he discusses at length in "One to Avoid, One to Embrace: Unmasking and Conflict Pluralism as European Heritages," forthcoming in the soon to be published third volume of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center). Chait is right to call out such unmaskings that separate the world into cliques of initiates and barbarians. We live in a plural world full of people with whom we disagree; learning how to talk with them, rather than over them, is an essential aspect of finding our way in our world.

Zoë Heller has an important essay in the NYRB on the legal and political movement to shift rape trials from law courts to campus and other administrative tribunals. It is, Heller argues, "a moral and strategic error for feminism--or any movement that purports to care about social justice--to argue for undermining or suspending legitimate rights, even in the interests of combating egregious crime." And yet, as Heller writes, "most anti-rape campus activists remain strongly in favor of keeping rape allegations an internal college matter. Students, they point out, are usually reluctant to go to the police (whose willingness to take sexual assault claims seriously they have good reason to mistrust), and because of this any attempt to institutionalize partnerships between campus security and law enforcement will only result in even fewer assaults being reported. Danielle Dirks, a sociology professor at Occidental College, and one of a group of women who have filed Title IX complaints against the university, recently told The Nation: 'I say this as a criminologist. I've given up on the criminal justice system. College campuses, which are supposed to be the bastions of cutting-edge knowledge and a chance to shape the rest of the country, actually can do right.' There is no doubt that the police and the courts are guilty of all manner of negligence, insensitivity, and rank stupidity in handling cases of sexual assault, but the wisdom of 'giving up' on criminal justice--of retreating from the fight for fair treatment under the law--and taking refuge in a system of ersatz college justice remains highly questionable. In addition to the fear of not being believed, the chief reason that students cite for not reporting their assaults to law enforcement is their uncertainty about whether the incidents constitute sufficiently grave crimes. Asking those students to take their allegations to campus tribunals--to have their claims adjudicated in essentially the same manner as plagiarism charges--does nothing to clear up their confusion about the seriousness of sexual assault. On the contrary, it actively encourages the trivialization of sexual violence."

David Leonhardt writes in a letter to subscribers of "The Upshot" that there is a basic confusion in the country around the term "middle class." "My favorite phrase in Josh Barro's much-discussed piece this week about who's rich and who's not was this one: '$400,000 isn't a lot of money--after you spend it.' Josh's argument was that while many people with household income of $400,000--or $200,000--may consider themselves middle class, they're actually affluent. Nationwide, fewer than 5 percent of households make at least $200,000. In New York, the share is only modestly higher. A common response--and you can read many in the comments section--is that a couple of hundred thousand dollars of annual income doesn't make people feel rich. They still have to worry about their spending, unlike the truly rich. After they've paid for a nice house in a good school district, a couple of vehicles, a vacation or two and the normal expenses of life, not to mention putting away money for retirement and college, they don't have much left over. All of which is often true. But here's the thing: Being able to afford those things is pretty good definition of affluence in modern American society."

Reihan Salam over in Slate also takes aim at what he calls the upper middle class in distinction from the rich. For Salam, it is the upper middle class and not the rich who are, in his words, ruining America. But Salam's argument is not the usual one. As a conservative, he finds common cause with the upper middle class whom, he writes, fends off tax hikes that could actually fund generous social democracies, such as those found in Europe. Instead, what bothers Salam is the way the upper middle class protects its privilege with zoning laws, professional registration fees, and immigration laws that make life more expensive and difficult for the merely middle class: "You might be wondering why I'm so down on the upper middle class when they're getting in the way of the tax hikes that will make big government even bigger. Doesn't that mean that while liberals should be bothered by the power of the upper middle class, conservatives should cheer them on? Well, part of my objection is that upper-middle-income voters only oppose tax hikes on themselves. They are generally fine with raising taxes on people richer than themselves, including taxes on the investments that rich people make in new products, services, and businesses. I find that both annoyingly self-serving and destructive. The bigger reason, however, is that upper-middle-class people don't just use their political muscle to keep their taxes low. They also use it to make life more expensive for everyone else. Take a seemingly small example--occupational licensing. In North Carolina, teeth-whiteners without expensive dental degrees would like to be allowed to sell their services but are opposed by the state's dentists, as Eduardo Porter noted in a recent New York Times column. Are the good dentists of North Carolina fighting the teeth-whiteners because they fear for the dental health of North Carolinians? It doesn't look like it. A more plausible story is that dentists don't want to compete with cut-rate practitioners, because restricting entry into the field allows them to charge higher prices. We often hear about how awesome it is that Uber is making taxi service cheaper and more accessible for ordinary consumers but how sad it is that they are making life harder for working-class drivers who drive traditional cabs.... You'd almost get the impression that while working- and lower-middle-class people are expected to compete, whether with the Ubers of the world or with Chinese manufacturing workers or with immigrants with modest skills, members of the upper middle class ought to be immune. The result is that all Americans have to pay more to get their teeth whitened, to get a formal education, or to do any of the other million things that we can only get through licensed providers."

Over at the Pew Research Center, a new set of surveys offers some surprising insights into the way Americans view their government. You may not be surprised to learn that the IRS is largely seen negatively, even more so by Republicans than by Democrats. But one surprising result is that the NSA has remained popular, even after the revelations by Edward Snowden and especially amongst young people. "Favorability ratings for the National Security Agency (NSA) have changed little since the fall of 2013, shortly after former NSA analyst Edward Snowden's revelations of the agency's data-mining activities. About half (51%) view the NSA favorably, compared with 37% who have an unfavorable view. Young people are more likely than older Americans to view the intelligence agency positively. About six-in-ten (61%) of those under 30 view the NSA favorably, compared with 40% of those 65 and older." This fits with the widely held belief that younger Americans are less protective of their privacy than their elders. Privacy, and why it matters, will be the theme of the Hannah Arendt Center's 8th annual conference this October 15-16th. Save the Date.

In an article about groups who are attempting to archive the internet, Jill Lepore bemoans the way the web has made the footnote unreliable: "The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is--elementally--ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: 'Page Not Found.' This is known as 'link rot,' and it's a drag, but it's better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as 'content drift,' and it's more pernicious than an error message, because it's impossible to tell that what you're seeing isn't what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as 'reference rot,' have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper--in court records and books and law journals--remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, 'more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.' The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It's like trying to stand on quicksand. The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy."

Harris Nye has a fascinating essay about the way different baseball fans react to advanced statistics. There are two kinds of fan. "Proponents of sabermetrics in baseball tend to speak very strongly when preaching the gospel of Bill James, mostly because the individual nature of baseball and the precision of baseball stats has created a sense of absolute certainty among saber-minded fans." On the other side, "baseball fans who dislike advanced stats are inevitably turned off by the firebrand nature of sabermetrics proponents. To the traditional minded baseball fan, a large part of what makes sports appealing is their uncertain nature." What to make of this opposition? For Nye, the difference is defense: namely, that statistically minded fans seek to take defense into account while common sense fans do not. Nye uses the example of a truly surprising statistical conclusion--that the Braves' Jason Heyward was 25% more valuable last year than Freddie Freeman--to argue that the source of the radical difference between common sense and statistical analysis is that most common sense baseball fans ignore defense. "The fact that by fWAR the gap between the two players can so dramatically reverse the value of the two players is the kind of thing that is so offensive to traditional minded fans about sabermetrics and wins above replacement. A Braves fan who just watched the team last year without using advanced stats would find the notion of Heyward being better than Freeman obviously false. Nobody likes their preconceived notions being challenged and it is always these issues of defense that cause wins above replacement to tell fans something vastly different from what they already believe about the value of individual players." Data analysis is so complicated and depends on such immense processing of information that it is impossible without computers. Which means that we no longer can have an informed discussion about baseball--or anything for that matter--without relying on mechanical brains. For those who think baseball is a game viewed with human eyes and the human brain as opposed to through a screen and a computer, statistical insight challenges the common sense world.

Hans Rollman looks at Julio Cortozar's Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampire: An Attainable Utopia, a hybrid, comics-novel recently translated into English that Cortozar conceived after participating in the Second Russell Tribunal, which was convened to investigate crimes committed by South American dictatorships, and then reading his own cameo appearance in the Mexican comic book Fantomas: "The genius of the book lies in the fact that it both has no prescriptive point, and at the same time conveys a remarkable multiplicity of points. It's a reflection of Cortazar's own frame of mind following the Second Russell Tribunal--his alternating waves of doubt and confidence; anger and despair and hope. In a world where injustice and genocide continue their march without blinking an eye, what was the point of the tribunal at all? It takes a plot within a plot within a plot to convey the inextricable complexity of injustice and violence in today's world, and a surreal fusion of the real with the fantastic to arrive at the hope that solutions are possible. Not to arrive at solutions, mind you--that eludes everyone, from Fantomas to the Russell Tribunal. But to arrive at the hope, that solutions are still possible, that utopia is attainable."

Putting Courage at the Centre: Gandhi on Civility, Society and Self-Knowledge

Monday, March 30, 2015

Manor House Cafe, 6:00 pm

Property and Freedom: Are Access to Legal Title and Assets the Path to Overcoming Poverty in South Africa?

A one-day conference sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, the Human Rights Project, and the Center for Civic Engagement, with support from the Ford Foundation, The Brenthurst Foundation, and The University of The Western Cape

Monday, April 6, 2015

Bard College Campus Center, Weis Cinema, 10:00 am - 7:00 pm

SAVE THE DATE - 2015 FALL CONFERENCE

Thursday and Friday, October 15 and 16, 2015

The Hannah Arendt Center's eighth annual fall conference, "Privacy: Why Does It Matter?," will be held this year onThursday and Friday, October 15-16, 2015! We'll see you there!

This week on the Blog, Hans Teerds draws upon the writings of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin to discuss the importance of the interior in people's lives in the Quote of the Week. John Dewey provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We appreciate two volumes of Churchill's history of the Second World War and how they may have influenced Arendt's understanding of the human condition in our Library feature. And we are pleased to acknowledge a Special Donation.

This coming Friday, February 6th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the fourth session of its Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing Chapter Two, Sections 7, 8, and 9 of The Human Condition.

The reading group is available to all members and is always welcoming new participants! Please click here to learn more!

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Meline Toumani has a great essay about the ways hatred between the Armenians and the Turks renders impossible the necessary objectivity of art. Toumani, an Armenian, can recount her version, but even telling her story she realizes that she tells one side and hates that: "I am doomed to be what is known as an unreliable narrator. I hate the way it feels." Her essay brings the power and force of hating to view in multiple perspectives. She acknowledges the fact of hatred, that "there are two things I know to be true. One: I know that if your grandmother told you she watched as her mother was raped and beheaded, you would feel something was yours to defend. What is that thing? Is it your grandmother you are defending? Is it the facts of what happened to her that you are defending, a page in an encyclopedia? Something as intangible as honor? Is it yourself that you are defending? If the story of the brutality that your grandmother encountered were denied or diminished in any way, you would feel certain basic facts of your selfhood extinguished. Your grandmother, who loved you and soothed you, your grandmother whose existence roots you in the world, fixes you somewhere in geography and history. Your grandmother feeds your imagination in a way that your mother and father do not. Imagination is farsighted; it needs distance to discern and define things. If somebody says no, what your grandmother suffered was not really quite as heinous as you're saying it is, they have said that your existence is not really so important. They have said nothing less than that you don't exist. This is a charge no human being can tolerate." But also, that hating corrupts her writing, her art. "Artistic objectivity: the ability to see a problem or an experience from multiple points of view; to tell a story for the sake of a deeper understanding, not to further an agenda; to inhabit the mind of the villain as fully as that of the victim. The villain, for me, had always been the Turk. It was time to try to understand him."

Diane Ravitch in the NY Review of Books looks at the myth of the exceptional Chinese schools and how it is fueling a testing craze in the United States. "At this juncture comes the book that Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, members of Congress, and the nation's governors and legislators need to read: Yong Zhao's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. Zhao, born and educated in China, now holds a presidential chair and a professorship at the University of Oregon. He tells us that China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But, he says, it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism. The imposition of standardized tests by central authorities, he argues, is a victory for authoritarianism. His book is a timely warning that we should not seek to emulate Shanghai, whose scores reflect a Confucian tradition of rote learning that is thousands of years old. Indeed, the highest-scoring nations on the PISA examinations of fifteen-year-olds are all Asian nations or cities: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Korea, Macao (China), and Japan."

Frank Bruni writes about "Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools," Joel Klein's forthcoming book on education. Bruni hones in on Klein's conclusion that the key to improving education is better teachers. Klein wants to make it easier to remove poor teachers. But he also argues that we need to rethink how we educate our teachers. "He said the curriculum at education schools should be revisited as well. There's a growing chorus for this; it's addressed in the recent best seller 'Building a Better Teacher,' by Elizabeth Green. But while Green hones in on the teaching of teaching, Klein stressed to me that teachers must acquire mastery of the actual subject matter they're dealing with. Too frequently they don't." Here Klein sounds like Hannah Arendt, who argues that teachers must teach young people about the world as it is; the first qualification for teaching, she writes, is "knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it." Which is why the Bard College Masters of Arts in Teaching "requires an equal amount of advanced study in the elected academic discipline and in education courses challenging preservice teachers to apply the results of research and pedagogical analysis to their teaching."

Should international law apply to the Global War On Terror? Marty Lederman and Naz Modirzadeh are debating this question on their respective blogs. Lederman has argued that the Obama administration should be praised for trying to bring the War on Terror within international law. Modirzadeh worries that in doing so, the administration is making International Humanitarian Law into a "toolkit for targeting" civilians and combatants. In other words, International Law is being turned into a guidebook for how and when to target civilians in the war on terror. Modirzadeh writes: "The lawyers, professors, and others, such as Lederman, who have been instrumental in shaping the Obama administration's legal framework have a vested interest in defending the administration's interpretations of international law and policy. I understand that. But I would urge us to consider the long-term implications for the legitimacy and coherence of how international law regulates war of both the legal arguments and the way they have been presented. The arguments for a seemingly boundary-less conception of non-international armed conflict against a terrorist organization or network (one that is quickly splintering and disaggregating), while crafted in response to pressing national security threats, have tremendous implications for international law in the future. In the hands of Syria, Russia, China, and other nations, such legal arguments-especially when seen as legitimized by the world's superpower-may unleash a wave of other boundary-less NIACs. Surely it isn't only the Obama administration lawyers who would like to argue that international law allows for the determination that traveling terrorist fighters can be targeted outside of situations of 'hot' battlefields. These arguments also matter, not only for the immediate debate in the U.S. but also for the decades of state action to come. Poking holes in the divide between the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello, blurring law and policy, drawing from IHL targeting rules for situations that do not rise to the level of armed conflict: we should, at a minimum, pause to reflect on the implications of these legal and strategic arguments in the hands of decision-makers other than those in the current administration."

In an essay in The National Post, Bettina Stangneth, author of the recent book Eichmann Before Jerusalem, writes of the many and conflicting versions of Adolf Eichmann. Stangneth's book deepens our understanding of Eichmann and helps show the complexity of any attempt to understand him according to simple reductions. She writes: "Depending on whose account you read, Eichmann comes across variously as an ordinary man who was turned into a thoughtless murderer by a totalitarian regime; a radical anti-Semite whose aim was the extinction of the Jewish people, or a mentally ill man whose innate sadism was legitimated by the regime. We have a multitude of irreconcilable images of Eichmann, made even more so by the controversy around Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The public view, however, largely remains an empty shell. We are still missing a view of the 'Eichmann phenomenon' before Jerusalem: the way Eichmann was perceived during the different periods of his life."

Sarah Burnside despairs over the fact that we can buy ourselves new hobbies, and therefore new identities, seeing it as a symptom of a larger cultural fracture: "'Identity politics' is commonly criticized for focusing on the narrowly personal at the expense of the structural, but such criticisms must be viewed with a skeptical eye. It would be ludicrous to argue that a person's race, gender, or sexuality has no impact on his or her lived experiences; you might as well claim that social class doesn't exist. Identities that are based on likes and dislikes, unmoored from the material world, are another matter entirely, however. It's jarring to read a journalist using the language of civic participation to refer to, say, enthusiastic adult fans of My Little Pony as 'the brony community.' The growth of bespoke selves may also be part of something broader: a kind of fracturing and splintering of the ways we conceptualize ourselves. If we're purchasing and inhabiting new identities, it's merely a continuation of our packaging and repackaging of curated versions of ourselves, such as in that minor absurdity of modern life: the Twitter bio."

Kelly Osgood sought out the music of the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton and couldn't quite put it away: "Anne Sexton the performer stands in some contrast to Anne Sexton the poet. Though both Linda Sexton and Bob Clawson claim she had no sense of rhythm and often fell into a kind predetermined modulation better suited for readings than musical performances, her voice on the recordings is lilting and measured, rising and softening in accordance with the band. Listening to a performance of 'Protestant Easter,' a hilarious poem that digs at New England Calvinism from the point of view of a child ('After that they pounded nails into his hands / After that, well, after that / everyone wore hats'), I begin to envision her covered in sweat, down on her knees in front of a congregation, shouting 'Praise Jesus!' as the organ trills away behind her. It becomes clear to me that I cannot separate the less comfortable aspects of Sexton and her work from the parts that are more easily accessible and more widely lauded. It was her unusual daring--can you imagine Plath doing a doo-wop version of 'Ariel?'--that fueled Sexton's work. I couldn't take only the fine formal verse and discard the later, sloppier, more desperate writings. I couldn't discard her failed experiments with prose and cling to only what was deemed Pulitzer-worthy."

Michael Powell spent the days before and the hours after Madison Bumgarner's heroic World Series performance with the pitcher's father back home in Hudson, North Carolina. His essay makes vivid the small town and homespun world from which Bumgarner hails and to which he still returns every year. Powell also introduces us to Kevin Bumgarner, Madison's father, who reminds us all that pride, while a sin in general, is a thing of beauty when expressed by a father to his son: "Then Kevin pulled out his phone. He had texted Madison after the eighth inning, and he tried to read it to me. He began to choke up and just handed me the phone. 'OMG. You're so much more than awesome,' Kevin had written to his son. 'To see you work on the mound reminds me of watching you in high school. You are willing yourself to perfection and dragging the team along with you. I couldn't be more proud of your baseball accomplishments.' Kevin looked at me. 'I knew he wouldn't read that text before the game was over,' he said, 'but I wanted him to know this was what his daddy thought of him.'"

This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Jurgens discusses Arendt's analysis of the Western tradition of revolution and how revolutionary episodes for her failed to enshrine the people's freedom in lasting institutions in the Quote of the Week. Marcel Proust provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In our Video Archives, we look back on a 2011 roundtable discussion on Occupy Wall Street. And we appreciate a particular passage that Arendt felt worthy of being underlined and marked with other annotations in our Library feature.

This coming Friday, November 7th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the first session of its new Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing the Prologue and the Introduction to The Human Condition.

The reading group is available to all members and is always welcoming new participants! Please click here to learn more!

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

"Every show of anger, as distinct from the anger I feel, already contains a reflection on it, and it is this reflection that gives the emotion the highly individualized form which is meaningful for all surface phenomena. To show one’s anger is one form of self-presentation: I decide what is fit for appearance."

-- Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (Thinking)

We are standing at a crossroads, forced to make a difficult decision in our lives. Conventional wisdom says, “Don’t think too much and follow your heart.” In other words: no matter how well-calculated and reasoned a possible choice might be, if you feel otherwise, you should take the path to which your heart is pointing. The assumption is that our emotions tell us who we really are, that deep down inside of us there is a true self. In feeling, we sense ourselves. Who is that self? Where does it reside?

Kazue Koishikawa recently earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at Duquesne University. She is working on her first book, in which she explores reading the political philosophy of Arendt as a phenomenological theory of imagination, particularly in Arendt’s interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic judgment. She specializes in phenomenology and political philosophy.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

In the London Review of Books’ winter lecture, classicist Mary Beard discusses how the silencing of women was a common dramatic trope throughout Greek and Roman antiquity. From Telemachus’ admonition to Penelope in the Odyssey (“take up your own work, the loom and the distaff…speech will be the business of men”) to the silencing of the princess Philomela by cutting out her tongue in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, female oratory was treated as inappropriate or even dangerous in the public sphere. In the classical tradition, “public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender. As we saw with Telemachus, to become a man – and we’re talking elite man – was to claim the right to speak. Public speech was a – if not the – defining attribute of male-ness.” The derision of female speech, argues Beard, was not only embedded in our modern traditions of speechmaking but remains an alarmingly widespread issue today, as women speaking in public face a far greater quantity of death threats, Internet trolling, and verbal abuse than men. “The more I have looked at the threats and insults that women have received, the more I have found that they fit into the old patterns I’ve been talking about,” writes Beard. “For a start it doesn’t much matter what line you take as a woman, if you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it, it’s the fact you’re saying it.”

Peggy Noonan is worried about the decadence of elite American culture in response to a video compilation of real congressmen quoting their favorite lines from the Netflix series “House of Cards,” and the recent publication of an excerpt from Kevin Roose’s new book Young Money. While the folks over at DailyKos are foaming about the irony of Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter complaining about the excesses of the power elites, Noonan makes an important point about the corrosive effects that irony has on elites and on culture more generally. “”House of Cards” very famously does nothing to enhance Washington’s reputation. It reinforces the idea that the Capital has no room for clean people. The earnest, the diligent, the idealistic, they have no place there. Why would powerful members of Congress align themselves with this message? Why do they become part of it? I guess they think they’re showing they’re in on the joke and hip to the culture. I guess they think they’re impressing people with their surprising groovelocity…. All of this is supposed to be merry, high-jinksy, unpretentious, wickedly self-spoofing. But it seems more self-exposing, doesn’t it? And all of it feels so decadent.” Read more about the decadence and irony of elites on the blog in Roger Berkowitz’s Weekend Read.

In a review of Mario Livio's new book Brilliant Blunders, Freeman Dyson praises the theory, particularly the incorrect theory, as the engine of science: "They are free creations of the human mind, intended to describe our understanding of nature. Since our understanding is incomplete, theories are provisional. Theories are tools of understanding, and a tool does not need to be precisely true in order to be useful. Theories are supposed to be more-or-less true, with plenty of room for disagreement. A scientist who invents a theory that turns out to be wrong is judged leniently. Mistakes are tolerated, so long as the culprit is willing to correct them when nature proves them wrong."

Ray Kurzweil reviews Spike Jonze's Her, which features a romance between a man and his computer's sentient operating system, and takes issue with the ending: “In my view, biological humans will not be outpaced by the AIs because they (we) will enhance themselves (ourselves) with AI. It will not be us versus the machines (whether the machines are enemies or lovers), but rather, we will enhance our own capacity by merging with our intelligent creations. We are doing this already. Even though most of our computers — although not all — are not yet physically inside us, I consider that to be an arbitrary distinction.”

In a review of Claude Lannzman's long percolating The Last of the Unjust, about Benjamin Murmelstein, the last surviving Jewish elder of the Nazi's show ghetto at Theresienstadt, Leah Falk wonders whether reportage or art will ultimately prove more effective at preserving the terror of the Holocaust: "Is there a kind of truth that can’t be adequately served by even the toughest oral testimony, but only by art? The film’s investigation is not: Was Murmelstein a collaborator? But rather, did Lanzmann’s interview with Murmelstein tell his story? Or were we too late? Has everyone, with regard to the Holocaust, always been too late? About Shoah, Lanzmann admitted that he had made a film about the kinds of stories the human brain was not made to handle. Our handling of them as they grow more distant, as the emotional current underneath the facts becomes even less immediately accessible, is something fragile, a skill that must be not only taught, but also constantly reinvented."

This week on the blog, Jennifer Hudson considers Arendt's understanding of knowledge as tyrannical, and Roger Berkowitz asks two journalists what they understand as their role. And Berkowitz also turns to Nietzsche and Arendt in the Weekend Read to make sense of our elite culture of decadence and irony.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Megan Garber points to research that suggests that soldiers who use battlefield robots as part of their missions often become quite fond of, maybe even empathetic towards, their helpers. "It makes sense that the tools that do so much work in the high-stakes environment of the battlefield would engender devotion from the people they benefit. According to... research, the soldiers assigned their robotic companions 'human or animal-like attributes, including gender.' Furthermore, they 'displayed a kind of empathy toward the machines.' And ‘they felt a range of emotions such as frustration, anger, and even sadness when their field robot was destroyed.'" Machines are increasingly able to act “as if they are human,” even when they are simply following complex algorithms. Shirley Turkle has shown how even people who understand the robotics involved develop deep human emotions for their robots. And David Levy has proposed legalizing marriage with robots. The question is: As we learn to love and relate to robots that are tireless, devoted, and obedient, how will that impact our relationships with humans who are often tired, cranky, and stubborn?

By the way, Megan Garber will be speaking in NYC on Oct. 27th along with Jay Rosen, Walter Russell Mead and Roger Berkowitz at the Bard Graduate Center as part of the Hannah Arendt Center’s panel on Blogging and the New Public Intellectual. Information here. RSVP at arendt@bard.edu.

In a consideration of MoMA's recently erected gallery of Walker Evans photographs, James Polchin emphasizes just how shocking Evans' photographs were when he took them more than three quarters of a century ago, suggesting that he did little other than represent what was: "Evans’ images exude a longing and melancholy for something lost. They are relics of a past, as much today as they were 75 years ago. They are decrepit sharecropper porches, ornate Victorian architecture, and decaying southern verandas. They are hauntingly empty small-town street corners and portraits of people who seem to have no place to go. There is in American Photographs no modernist romance of a dynamic future, no awe of machines or the possibilities of the future that were so often modernism’s compelling allure. Instead we are left with a certain absence that is both material and psychological. American Photographs remind us that modernism was also heaped in a kind of creative longing for all that was disappearing."

In an interview, J.B. Mackinnon, author of the recent book The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be talks about what it would mean to "rewild" the planet: “I now find myself comparing co-existence with other species to life in a multicultural city: it’s complicated and demands innovation and often education, but when it works it creates the most exciting societies the world has ever known. Few people who live in multicultural cities would say it’s easy, but even fewer, I think, would say they would prefer homogeneity. The shared culture of difference becomes a part of our individual identities, and at that point, a harm to diversity really does become a harm to us all. Now consider a similar relationship, this time not to cultural but to ecological complexity, and we have what I would consider the rewilding of the human being. Ecology as a part of identity." An interesting thought experiment, but who does MacKinnon have to displace to make it work? Perhaps more importantly, is such an environmental modification really returning to nature in some way, or is it instead more proof of man's supposed mastery over his environment? Indeed, isn’t so much of the talk about sustainability and the preservation of nature rather a furthering of the human desire to master, control, and make of nature what man wants—except that we now want nature to be natural. Marianne Constable makes this argument beautifully in her essay “The Rhetoric of Sustainability: Human, All Too Human,” available in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center.

In order to better understand the situation in Greece, Arnon Grunberg went to Thessaloniki, the country's second largest city. There, he met with the mayor and some of the city's citizens; one of them, Debbie, echoes Arendt when she talks about what Greeks might glean from their current situation: “Efficiency is a capitalist term that assumes one has the goal of achieving a certain level of productivity. That’s not the way we think. Capitalism, of course, is what sired this crisis. But the crisis is also an opportunity to ask the right questions. We want to teach people that they have the power to fight back. No one can take away your dignity, that’s what I tell them. No one has to be embarrassed by the fact that the system can’t guarantee that everyone has health insurance. The power of capitalism lies in how it presents itself as the sole alternative. I don’t have any illusions about ever seeing it disappear, but we can create little fissures in it.”

This week on the blog, Jennifer Hudson writes about the “False Culture of Utility” in an excellent Quote of the Week coming from a reading of Arendt’s essay “The Crisis of Culture.” In advance of our sixth annual conference next week, "Failing Fast: The Educated Citizen in Crisis," your weekend read is on the topic of education.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Clocking in as the longest article ever in Time (h/t Dylan Byers), Steven Brill’s cover story is the single-best account of the insanity and corruption of our current medical system. Why do we accept the skyrocketing costs of medical care? “Those who work in the health care industry and those who argue over health care policy seem inured to the shock.” Brill shows us why the bills are really way too high. Hint: it is not because the care is so good. There are so many excess costs in the system, that reforming it should be easy, if it weren’t so corrupt.

David Goldhill wants to give all working Americans $1,800,000, the amount he calculates a 23 year-old beginning work today at $35,000/year will pay, directly or indirectly, in health care insurance benefits. Goldhill argues that our health care system wastes most of that money because people have no incentive to attend to costs. He suggests a dual system. Give every American health insurance for truly rare and unpredictable illnesses. But for regular costs and smaller emergencies, he would refund workers the money they are losing and let them pay for healthcare themselves.

Oliver Sacks walks through his past and, with the help of his brother, discovers that a memory he had believed his own had actually been that of another. Starting from there, he gives a short account of the weakness of individual remembering, which allows us to take in something we've heard or seen and make it our own. He concludes, finally, that "memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds."

Michael Lewis writes of the rise of an unapologetic business class in the 1990s and early 2000’s, that they enjoyed the “upside to big risk-taking, the costs of which would be socialized, if they ever went wrong. For a long time they looked simply like fair compensation for being clever and working hard. But that’s not what they really were; and the net effect was… to get rid of the dole for the poor and replace it with a far more generous, and far more subtle, dole for the rich.”

Five women. “Two are wives and daughters in ordinary families unable to comprehend why such misfortune has overtaken them. A third is a young bride living in the household of a high party official. The last two are wives of the Master’s executioners. These stories are based on their memoirs—some written by themselves, others by close friends or by their children. These five women put a human face on the terror of Stalin’s purges and the Gulag in the Soviet Union of the 1930s.”

“Debt doesn’t look like much. It has no shape or smell. But, over time, it leaves a mark. In Spain, it manifested itself, first, as empty buildings, stillborn projects, and idled machines.” So writes Nick Paumgarten. To see how debt looks and smells, look at Simon Norfolk's surreal photographs of Residencial Francisco Hernando, an unfinished development near Seseña, Spain. Working his way through a half-finished city with few people in it, Norfolk's photography suggests that even beginning construction was an act of hubris; "everyone," he says, "wanted to get rich doing nothing."

The Arendt Center’s 2012 conference “Does the President Matter?” asked whether political leadership is still possible today. Guatam Mukunda believes that we can measure the value of a particular leader based on their behavior at the margins—what did that person accomplish over and above what another would have been able to do? In the accompanying video, Mukunda argues that leaders can only be great or terrible when the people selected for such roles are relatively unknown to those making the selection. In an age of information, the chances are slim.

This week on the blog

This week on the blog, we argued that American reformers should shift their efforts at reforming education towards high school and pointed towards Richard Kahlenberg's recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, adding that "poverty, more than race or gender, is increasingly the true mark of disadvantage in 21st century America." We also continued the inquiry into the growing threat that entitlements pose to the next generation, highlighting Geoffrey Canada and Peter Druckenmiller's argument that entitlements are a generational theft that must be arrested. Elsewhere, Na'ama Rokem quotes from Arendt's only Yiddish-language article to explore the philosopher's language politics and her Jewish identity. Jeff Champlin looked at some similarities between Habermas and Arendt in their understandings of power. In the Weekend Read, Roger Berkowitz argues that we need to free federalism from its present partisanship and recall the important connection between federalism and freedom. Finally, if you didn't get around to our remembrance of Ronald Dworkin, you should take some time and give it a read.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

In this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard D. Kahlenberg lifts (or rips) the band-aid off a wound that has been festering for decades. For much of the 20th century, class animated campus Marxists. Since the 1970s, race and gender have largely supplanted class as the source of youthful protest. But the pendulum is swinging back. Studies find that "being an underrepresented minority increased one's chances of admissions at selective colleges by almost 28 percentage points, but that being low-income provided no boost whatsoever." Will racial and gender politics give way to a renewed interest in class? Will there be a divide on the left between class and identity politics? In either case, the debate is beginning.

Here is Kahlenberg:

Long hidden from view, economic status is emerging from the shadows, as once-taboo discussions are taking shape. The growing economic divide in America, and on American campuses, has given rise to new student organizations, and new dialogues, focused on raising awareness of class issues—and proposing solutions. With the U.S. Supreme Court likely to curtail the consideration of race in college admissions this year, the role of economic disadvantage as a basis for preferences could further raise the salience of class.

This interest represents a return to an earlier era. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, class concerns animated Marxists on campus and New Deal politicians in the public sphere. Both groups papered over important dimensions of race and gender to focus on the nation's economic divide. Programs like Federal Housing Administration-guaranteed loans and the GI Bill provided crucial opportunities for upward mobility to some working-class families and students.

Colleges, meanwhile, began using the SAT to identify talented working-class candidates for admission. But FHA loans, the GI Bill, and the SAT still left many African-Americans, Latinos, and women out in the cold.

In the 1960s and 70s, that narrow class focus was rightly challenged by civil-rights activists, feminists, and advocates of gay rights, who shined new light on racism, sexism and homophobia. Black studies, women's studies, and later gay studies took root on college campuses, along with affirmative-action programs in student admissions and faculty employment to correct for the lack of attention paid to marginalized groups by politicians and academics alike.

Somewhere along the way, however, the pendulum swung to the point that issues of class were submerged. Admissions officers, for example, paid close attention to racial and ethnic diversity, but little to economic diversity. William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University, and his colleagues reported in 2005 that being an underrepresented minority increased one's chances of admissions at selective colleges by almost 28 percentage points, but that being low-income provided no boost whatsoever. Campuses became more racially and ethnically diverse—and all-male colleges began admitting women—but students from the most advantaged socioeconomic quartile of the population came to outnumber students from the least advantaged quartile at selective colleges by 25 to 1, according to a 2004 study by the Century Foundation.

Kahlenberg’s inquiry into the return of class to debates on campus cannot be seen outside the context of rising inequality in the U.S. Just this week Anne Lowrey reports in the New York Times that incomes are rising briskly for the top 1% but are actually stagnant or falling for everyone else:

Incomes rose more than 11 percent for the top 1 percent of earners during the economic recovery, but not at all for everybody else, according to new data.

It may be true that prices are declining and the middle class, despite its wage stagnation, is still living well. But we cannot ignore the increasing divide between the rich and the middle class. Not to mention the poor.

This was the topic of an op-ed essay in Monday’s New York Times by Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, who writes, “The gap between aspiration and reality could hardly be wider.” Stiglitz, like Kahlenberg, sets the question of class inequality against increasing racial equality:

While racial segregation decreased, economic segregation increased. After 1980, the poor grew poorer, the middle stagnated, and the top did better and better. Disparities widened between those living in poor localities and those living in rich suburbs — or rich enough to send their kids to private schools. A result was a widening gap in educational performance — the achievement gap between rich and poor kids born in 2001 was 30 to 40 percent larger than it was for those born 25 years earlier, the Stanford sociologist Sean F. Reardon found.

Many on the left will respond that race and class are linked: minorities, who are poor, they say, suffer worst of all. That may be true. But race, gender, and identity have dominated the conversation about equality and oppression in this country for 50 years. That is changing. This will be hard for some to accept, and yet it makes sense. Poverty, more than race or gender, is increasingly the true mark of disadvantage in 21st century America.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.